Dublin, Ohio: the rock under the village, and the town that grew after 1970

For most of its history Dublin was a village of a few hundred people on shallow limestone, twelve miles up the Scioto River from Columbus by the Ohio State Board of Health's reckoning. In 1898 the village told that board it had "no sewerage at all," and gave the reason in the next line: the rock lay so close to the surface that the village had never had sewers. The Census Bureau counted 237 people in Dublin in 1940, 214 housing units in the whole town in 1970, and 5,918 housing units in 1990. This page follows the water and the waste from the village returns the state printed to the arrangement the city works under now, and it says where the record stops: nothing read for this page dates the arrival of public water mains or sanitary sewers at Dublin houses.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Ohio State Board of Health's, the Census Bureau's, the federal drinking water inventory's and the City of Dublin's own, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The village John Sells laid out

The City of Dublin says John Sells platted part of his land to establish a village in 1810, and asked John Shields, the surveyor who platted the site, to name it. Shields, in the Dublin Historical Society's words, "called it Dublin for his home in Ireland," in place of the older name the city gives, Sells Settlement. Two older county histories put it eight years later: the 1880 History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties says "The village of Dublin was laid out by John Sells in 1818," and Hooper's 1920 history of Columbus lists Dublin among villages founded in 1818. Both dates print here and neither is chosen.

Peter and Benjamin Sells had bought four hundred acres where Dublin now stands for their brother John. The Dublin Historical Society says the family settled at this bend of the Scioto partly because clean drinking water was plentiful, "supplied by at least seven natural springs." The 1880 county history confirms a spring at the Dublin bridge, but not seven.

Dublin was incorporated twice. The county history and the Society both record an incorporation as a village in 1855, with Zenas Hutchinson elected mayor, and the county history says the arrangement was given up after about a year's trial. The village incorporated again in 1881, which the Society says required a population of 400 and the signatures of 82 registered voters.

"The rock is so close to the surface": what the village told the state

Every Ohio village answered an annual questionnaire from the Ohio State Board of Health, and the Board printed the answers village by village. Dublin's entry for 1898, signed by the village health officer, says the village has "no sewerage at all." The reason follows in the next line: "The rock is so close to the surface we never have had sewers." The same entry says the village's privy vaults "are never cleaned nor any attention paid to them," and that no arrangements had been made for the removal of garbage or night soil.

A year later the same officer told the Board that night soil was hauled away, and that in some places on the surface of limestone "it is carried off through the crevices in the rock." That 1899 entry also says, in its second sentence, that "Sewerage is all right." Both are printed here rather than smoothed into one account. What the state geological survey calls ground shaped that way by dissolving limestone is on the page about what goes wrong in a Central Ohio house.

These were the returns of a very small place. The Board printed an estimated population of 275 for Dublin in 1902 and 370 in 1905, with 68 reported cases of infectious disease that year, 50 of them measles; those are cases reported to the local board, not a measured rate. Asked in 1904 how the village collected its garbage, the officer answered that there was no system, and that garbage was disposed of by "throwing in back yards, streets and alleys of the village."

A well, a cistern and a barrel of salt

The clearest picture of what that meant for a house is in the Board's report for 1890, under the heading Typhoid Fever at Dublin. "An outbreak of typhoid fever occurred in the family of Mr. Corbin, a miller," it reads, of a family living just outside the village, and all six children were found ill. The Board's inspector reported that the well stood at the kitchen door, about seventy feet deep and dug through solid rock, with a large cistern twelve feet away on higher ground, and named "the probable pollution of the well through the intervention of an adjacent leaky cistern" as the point of special interest.

He then proved it. A barrel of salt was emptied into the filled cistern, and samples of the well water were drawn at eight, twelve, twenty-four and forty-eight hours and tested against a silver nitrate solution; the attending physician afterward wrote that the investigation had "established beyond doubt that the well was being fed from the cistern." Both the 1880 county history and the Dublin Historical Society name a Corbin as the last owner of the mill at Dublin, spelling the name differently.

The town pump, and what the state record never printed for Dublin

Dublin City Schools' local history says that when fire almost destroyed the town in 1878, "The citizens put out the fire with buckets of water from the town pump." The Dublin Historical Society says the water pump in the middle of the Dublin Road and Route 161 intersection was removed in 1926, after a car struck its protective wall, and that it had been "one of several sites where residents came to get fresh water" before running water was available in their homes.

What the state record does not contain matters as much as what it does. Across the Board's annual reports from 1886 through 1913 there is no approval of a public water works or a sewerage system for Dublin, while the same volumes print approvals for neighboring Franklin County villages: sanitary sewers and purification works for Marble Cliff in 1909, a water supply for Grandview Heights in 1910 and a well supply for Worthington in 1912, which are set out on this site's pages about the early suburbs and Worthington. An absence in a searched record is not proof that nothing existed.

The Board explained the silence in 1911, when it listed Dublin among the communities on the Scioto River above Columbus, twelve miles above the city by water, with a population of 239 in the 1910 census. "Several of the smaller villages were not inspected," it wrote.

There is also no fire insurance map. The Library of Congress holds no Sanborn map of Dublin, so the water facilities line those maps print in a town's title block, the line that dates the water of Westerville on this site, has no Dublin equivalent; the same search returns six Westerville editions.

What the census counted in Dublin, and what it never counted

The Census Bureau counted 237 people in Dublin village in 1940 and 289 in 1950. It also noted that the village was returned in 1940 in Washington township only, and that the part of it lying in Perry township had no population in 1950.

For bathrooms there is nothing at all. The 1950 Census of Housing published no plumbing figures for Dublin: its Ohio tables stop at places of 1,000 to 2,500 inhabitants, and Dublin had 289 people. So no census figure exists for how many houses in Dublin had a bathtub or an indoor toilet before 1970. The nearest published measure covering houses like Dublin's is the Franklin County rural nonfarm panel of that same volume, printed on the page about Gahanna.

Then the town became a different town. The Census Bureau counted 214 housing units in the whole of Dublin in 1970 and 5,918 in 1990, and the figures below are its own. Housing units are the Bureau's count of units, not of households.

By 1990 Dublin lay in three counties. The Bureau divided its 16,366 people into 12,551 in Franklin County, 3,811 in Delaware County and 4 in Union County, where in 1970 all 681 had been in Franklin County. Its estimates base for Dublin on April 1, 2020 was 49,315 people and its estimate for July 1, 2024 was 49,456; the first of those is the Bureau's estimates base rather than the published 2020 census count.

The 1970s, and two dates that do not meet

The City of Dublin names three things that turned it from a rural village into a suburban business center in the 1970s: Ashland Chemical's decision to locate a new building in Dublin, the decision to include a ramp to Dublin at the I-270 outerbelt, and the development of the Muirfield Village Golf Club and residential community. The Dublin Historical Society dates the opening of the west outerbelt, I-270, between I-71 north and I-70 west to 1971, and Jack Nicklaus's own account agrees with the Society that construction at Muirfield Village began in 1972 and the course opened in 1974. Dublin became a city in 1987; the Dublin Historical Society dates it to August of that year and puts the new city at an estimated population of 11,000 in 17 square miles.

When Dublin went onto Columbus water and sewer is where the record divides, and this page prints the division rather than a year. The Dublin Historical Society's timeline records the village's first water and sewer contract with Columbus in 1971; that is one line in one timeline, and no City of Dublin or City of Columbus document was found that dates a first contract. The federal drinking water inventory says something the timeline does not: it carries one community water system named for the City of Dublin, drawing groundwater from a single well and serving 16,000 people, deactivated on September 1, 1989.

Neither record excludes the other. A town can buy water for part of its area and keep its own well for another, and a deactivation in that inventory can mean a system was folded into another rather than switched off. Nothing read for this page reconciles them, so they stand apart. Nothing found says when public water mains or sanitary sewers first reached houses in Dublin, and no record of a Dublin sewage treatment plant was found at any date.

Who supplies the water and the sewer in Dublin now

The City of Dublin says it "does not own or operate wastewater treatment facilities or a water treatment facility," and that the City of Columbus provides water service to all Dublin residents and businesses on the public distribution system. The agreements it runs under were entered in 1993, and their dates and term are on this site's page about who supplies water and sewer in Central Ohio towns.

The split between the two cities is worth knowing at street level. Under the 1993 water agreement, the City of Dublin says Columbus is responsible for routine maintenance and operation of the water distribution system inside Dublin, while Dublin keeps the fire hydrants, the water storage facilities and the pressure reducing valve vaults. Under the 1993 sanitary sewer agreement, the City says operation and maintenance of the sanitary sewer collection system within Dublin "is the responsibility of the City of Dublin," while Columbus treats the wastewater. So the water pipe in a Dublin street is looked after by one city and the sewer pipe by the other. That is Dublin's own arrangement, and another Central Ohio town may differ.

The City's community plan gives the size of it: more than 225 miles of sanitary sewers and a single pump station sending about 6 million gallons a day to Columbus for treatment, and over 227 miles of water pipe, 2,997 public fire hydrants and six storage tanks. Those chapters are undated and describe work completed in 2010 and 2013, so they are plan-era figures rather than current-year measurements.

One name causes confusion. The Columbus plant called the Dublin Road water treatment plant is not in Dublin: the federal drinking water inventory records it at 940 Dublin Road, Columbus. Its history and what it serves are on the page about where Columbus water comes from.

The homes inside Dublin still on a well and a septic system

The City of Dublin says its water and sewer extension effort will evaluate "28 developed areas (approximately 500 residential properties)" inside the city that are not currently served by public water and sanitary sewer. That is the scope of an evaluation the city published in 2024, and its own count, rather than a live census of unconnected houses today. Dublin City Council adopted the extension policy on December 7, 2015 and amended it on April 25, 2022, and the City says it prioritizes extension projects by a health risks assessment and waives all of its own connection charges to encourage connections.

Connecting one of those houses is not a single-desk job, and the two halves of it differ. The City says a house connecting to the public water main must coordinate inspections with the City of Dublin, the City of Columbus and Franklin County Public Health, while a house connecting to the public sanitary sewer coordinates with the City of Dublin and Franklin County Public Health. Abandoning a well or a home sewage treatment system also goes through Franklin County Public Health. That is the arrangement in the part of Dublin lying in Franklin County; a Dublin address in Delaware or Union County answers to a different health district. What a well or a septic system means for a bathroom is on the page about wells and septic systems.

Historic Dublin, its review board and the city's building department

Dublin runs its own building department, the Building Standards Division, headed by a Director of Building Standards who is the city's chief building official. Chapter 150.140 to 150.146 of the codified ordinances of the City of Dublin requires building trade contractors and subcontractors "to obtain a Contractor's Registration prior to commencing work" in the city. That is the City's own description of its chapter; the library hosting the ordinance text refuses automated readers.

Dublin's Architectural Review Board "reviews site modifications or demolitions within the Historic District" and at outlying designated historic properties named in Dublin's zoning code. The Dublin High Street Historic District, covering 6 to 126 High Street on both sides of the street, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1979, as part of the Washington Township multiple resource area. The National Park Service has not digitized the nomination, so nothing about the district's buildings is carried here. A National Register listing is not by itself a restriction on a private owner; the review board is the body that reviews changes.

What a remodel in Dublin meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a bathroom in Dublin is like now, and a project answers to the rules of whichever building department covers that address. The subjects a remodel here runs into are set out elsewhere on this site: the permit a Columbus bathroom remodel needs, the plumbing code the work is held to, the supply pipe eras, the sewer lateral and the house drains, and wells and septic systems.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• City of Dublin, Ohio, History, undated; read September 2026.
• Dublin Historical Society, Timeline of Dublin, Ohio, undated; read September 2026.
• Williams Brothers, History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties, Ohio, Washington Township chapter, 1880; read September 2026.
• Osman Castle Hooper, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, 1920; read September 2026.
• Dublin Historical Society, Did You Know?, undated; read September 2026.
• Dublin City Schools, Our Dublin History, Dublin Timeline, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1898, village reports, 1898; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1899, village reports, 1899; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1902, village reports, 1902; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1905, village reports, 1905; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1904, village reports, 1904; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1890, Typhoid Fever at Dublin, 1890; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Reports of the State Board of Health of Ohio, the run from 1886 to 1913, 1886-1913; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Ohio, 1911, investigation of pollution of the Scioto above Columbus, 1911; read September 2026.
• Library of Congress, Sanborn Maps collection search, Ohio, Dublin, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume I, Number of Inhabitants, Ohio, 1952; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Housing, Volume I, General Characteristics, Part 5, Ohio, 1953; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1990 Census of Population and Housing, Population and Housing Unit Counts, Ohio, CPH-2-37, 1993; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places in Ohio: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024, SUB-IP-EST2024-POP-39, 2025; read September 2026.
• Nicklaus Companies, Fabulous at 40, May 29, 2014; read September 2026.
• United States Environmental Protection Agency, Envirofacts, Safe Drinking Water Information System, WATER_SYSTEM and WATER_SYSTEM_FACILITY, PWSID OH2504112, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Envision Dublin Community Plan, Municipal Service Agreements, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Water and Sanitary Sewer, Applications and Permits, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Envision Dublin Community Plan, Sanitary Sewer, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Envision Dublin Community Plan, Water Supply, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Environmental Protection Agency, Envirofacts, Safe Drinking Water Information System, WATER_SYSTEM, PWSID OH2500411, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Tell Dublin, Public Water Utility and Sanitary Sewer Utility Extensions to Existing Developed Property Policy, 2024; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Applications and Permits, Building Standards, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Dublin, Ohio, Architectural Review Board, undated; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, NPGallery asset detail, Dublin High Street Historic District, National Register Information System 79003645, 1979; read September 2026.

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